Audio programming is typically broadcast from a central point to multiple receiving points. In wireless systems, such as broadcast radio and TV (satellite or terrestrial), or wireless cellular broadcast systems, the audio programming is sampled and compressed for transmission. It is then processed at the receiving end to reproduce the audio programming. This process uses significant transmission bandwidth, especially for high fidelity audio reproduction. Where speech is the audio programming, the speaker is identifiable from the reproduced audio at the receiving end. However, along with the high bandwidth required to transmit high fidelity audio, the receiving devices generally only reproduce the original audio. The user at the receiving end cannot control the gender, inflection, tone, speed, language, etc. of the broadcast audio speech. Further, because of the high bandwidth required, there are only a limited number of channels available to transmit a limited array of audio selection.
It is well known in the art to represent audio speech with text or phonetic symbols. These representations can then be processed in speech synthesizers to produce audible speech. It is also well known to apply various parameters to the synthesization process in order to produce speech with various alternative attributes, such as gender, inflection, speed, tone, volume, etc. It is also known that speech synthesis from representative symbols can be accomplished in any language, by changing the symbology selection, such as by using alternative phonetic representations.
It is also known that broadcast TV and radio stations are often networked and syndicated, resulting in broadcasts that are nationwide. In this process, local information (local sports, news, weather, etc.) is often not provided to listeners or viewers.
A common problem of broadcast audio is the chance that the transmission will be interrupted, such as when a vehicle enters a tunnel or goes behind a structure. Since it is a broadcast situation (the receiving device cannot generally send a signal to the broadcast transmitter requesting a re-transmission), the audio transmitted during the interruption will be lost.
In view of the above discussion, it should be appreciated that there is a need for new and improved ways of transmitting audio information, either alone or in combination with transmitted video programming.